The Milky Way (1936)

The Milky Way is an American film comedy first released in 1936, directed by Leo McCarey and Norman Z. McLeod.  The film stars Harold Lloyd, Adolphe Menjou, Verree Teasdale, Helen Mack and William Gargan.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Burleigh Sullivan is a timid, inoffensive milkman who wouldn’t harm a fly, yet one evening he somehow manages to knock out a man who had been antagonising his sister.  When it transpires that Burleigh’s victim is the world middleweight boxing champion Speed McFarland, the newspapers have a field day.  The truth of the matter is that Speed was floored not by Burleigh, but by the boxer’s sparring partner Spider Schultz when the milkman ducked as the latter tried to land him a punch.  Speed’s manager, Gabby Sloan, sees an opportunity to make some easy money and begins to promote Burleigh as a boxer, fixing the fights so that the former milkman always wins.  Burleigh’s initial motivation for taking up boxing was to raise money to pay for a doctor to take care of his sick horse, but his easy successes soon begin to go to his head.  He really believes that he is a prize fighter and has no idea that Gabby has built up his reputation merely to knock him back down again in a fight with Speed McFarland...

One of the best known and most successful of Harold Lloyd’s talkies, The Milky Way may lack the spectacular visual stunt gags that we associate with Lloyd but it has plenty to compensate for this in the way of wholesome knockabout fun.  Based on a popular stage play of the same name by Lynn Root and Harry Clork, first performed on Broadway in 1934, this is an early example of the screwball comedy, a fast-moving and intoxicating humour fest which often veers towards the oddly surreal.   The film was directed by Leo McCarey who had previously helmed the Marx Brothers madcap masterpiece Duck Soup (1933) and would go onto to direct the screwball classic The Awful Truth (1937).

Lloyd is universally acknowledged as a comedy giant of the silent era but his sound films are generally looked down on as inferior creations.  The comedian, now well into middle-age, was no longer as agile as he had once been and the limitations of the early sound recording equipment limited what could feasibly be put onto the cinema screen.  Yet the magic is still there.  Lloyd still has that irresistible flair for anarchic fun, is still able to play sympathetic characters and still manages to deliver the laughs by the cart-load, as this film amply demonstrates.  Only a three-week-old corpse with a humour bypass can sit through a Harold Lloyd film without laughing.

The Milky Way was later remade by producer Samuel Goldwyn as the lavish musical comedy The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), with Danny Kaye in the lead role and Lionel Stander reprising the part of Spider Schultz.  When he bought the rights, Goldwyn acquired the original negative and all available prints of Lloyd’s film and (shock horror) destroyed them.  Fortunately, a few prints survived, including one held in Harold Lloyd’s own personal collection.  Lloyd’s film is easily superior to the glitzy brash Goldwyn remake, and it is certainly much, much funnier.   But then again, how could Danny Kaye possibly compare with a heavyweight like Harold Lloyd?

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...


What do you think of this film?

More American Comedy
Recent DVD releases